Continuing the discussion from Ponderous at the Ponderosa:
I had a CEO who was generally regarded as mostly harmless...but when we moved to a new office he proudly pointed out the new cubicles had lower walls to "facilitate conversation." Hmmm...I never heard any of the dev top complain about conversations needing facilitation. And the last thing developer's need are the rampant distractions afforded by being able to see and hear everything that goes on without being able to shut it out. Our previous cubicles were some of the best made, high walls, plenty of room for bookshelves...oops....the new ones had little room for more than a couple of titles, so the nice neat clean new office space quickly had stacks of books piling up outside the cubes. Besides facilitating communications the new layout facilitated a lot of tripping over books and the expected profanity.
Right after the move I went on vacation and came back to find my extra-comfy chair missing and replaced with chairs billed as one of the more expensive models in the industry. Yes, and it hurt my back. I was told that my back-saving chair didn't look right with all of the others.